Read an Excerpt from “Metropolitan Latinidad,” Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the full social canvas of American cities since at least the early twentieth century. Metropolitan Latinidad: Transforming American Urban History traverses metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, El Paso, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, collecting essays by both established and emerging scholars. The contributors engage a diverse range of subjects, such as urban rebellions, the suburbanization of Latinos, affordable housing, labor, the built environment, transnationalism, place-making, and religious life. They also explore race within Latino communities, as well as the role that political and economic dynamics have played in creating Latino urban spaces.
Read an excerpt from the introduction, written by editor A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, below.
For at least half a century, urban history has fallen behind the pace of change in American cities. In the nation’s largest metropolis, young people growing up in most neighborhoods in the 1970s would have heard Spanish spoken every day: perhaps in their own homes, possibly at school or work, almost certainly on the streets of the city. The most recent census had found that nearly one in six New Yorkers was Hispanic; in the Bronx, where I was born, the proportion was approaching one in three. And that was before the arrival of more than half a million new Latino migrants, who lifted their share of the city’s population to 20 percent by 1980 and 25 percent by 1990.
While most Latin American migrants to New York City arrived after midcentury, the community had been two hundred years in the making. Cuban sugar planters traveled to the city in the 1770s and established a substantial presence beginning in the 1830s. Puerto Rican sojourners began their own process of settlement two decades later, and over the subsequent hundred years, waves of merchants, political dissidents, and laborers established newspapers, mutual aid societies, and other civic institutions. They were followed by newcomers from across the hemisphere, making New York home to the greatest number of people of Latin American ancestry of any city in the United States.
Yet if one of these migrantes or one of their descendants went to college to learn the history of the city, they might have been confused to find their community virtually absent from it. Urban historians had spent decades producing a wealth of information about everything from infrastructure, transportation, and finance to machine politics, vice districts, and Beaux-Arts to gender, immigration, and race. Especially race: by the 1980s, a generation of urbanists had definitively demonstrated that it was impossible to understand the history of cities and suburbs in the United States without recognizing the centrality of institutional and structural racism. Race, however, was almost always defined in terms of Black and white. So Latina and Latino collegians often found themselves asking, as I did with likely annoying regularity, “But professor, what about Latin people?” It just seemed that because there were over a million and a half of us in New York City, we should be a much bigger part of its history. The question was not a new one—as we shall see, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans had already been asking it for more than twenty years. And by then there was a recent history of the city’s largest Hispanic population: Virginia Sánchez Korrol was the first to systematically research the topic for her seminal 1983 book From Colonia to Community. But with that important exception, there was little else available to us that was relevant to the urban history literature.
A decade later, a similar situation presented itself in Chicago. By the 1990s, the Windy City had been the foremost location for urban research in the United States for eight decades, ever since the emergence of the Chicago School in the 1910s. Mexicans and Mexican Americans had called the city home throughout those years, joined by a large Puerto Rican community beginning in the latter 1940s and a small Colombian one in the 1950s; and starting around 1970, the arrival of more than half a million new migrantes had dramatically increased the size, diversity, and vitality of Latino Chicago. Their influence was visible at every scale: the Hispanic undergraduate student group I advised was large and active, and it even included a recent community reina, Miss Little Village. My fellow graduate student Eduardo Contreras and I regularly traveled west to the Chicago Lawn neighborhood to teach English and to find sustenance at the local taquerías and panaderías. And within a few years, Crain’s Chicago Business made national news when it reported that the Twenty-Sixth Street commercial corridor in Little Village was second only to the city’s Magnificent Mile along Michigan Avenue in generating sales tax revenue.
The historical literature on the city, however, still overwhelmingly hewed to the Black-white racial binary. Historians had long looked to Chicago to ask their biggest questions about race in the United States: they had inquired into the migrations that established its Black community, the origins of its severe racial segregation, the way that African Americans created churches, businesses, and associations, and their struggle for equality and political representation. This is not to say that no historical work on Latinos was available: there was, to be sure, the inspiration of Louise Año Nuevo Kerr’s pathbreaking yet unpublished 1976 dissertation on ethnic Mexicans in Chicago; we could also look to Felix Padilla’s 1985 book of historical sociology Latino Ethnic Consciousness, which was based on his earlier fieldwork in the city. But much influential scholarship on Chicago Latinos was still in progress and appeared only at or after the new millennium. This was the case even with more present-oriented disciplines: Marta Tienda’s series of sociological articles on Mexican migrants appeared only between 1999 and 2004, Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave in 2002, and the anthropologist Nicholas De Genova’s Working the Boundaries in 2005. Nearing the turn of the millennium, the historianswho would write foundational histories of Latino Chicago were still graduatestudents, and to the extent that Latino urban history was being published, itwas happening somewhere else than the Latino metropolis of the Midwest.
That somewhere else was primarily Los Angeles. From its origins as an Indigenous population center for at least three thousand years and a Spanish settlement for more than two centuries, Los Angeles became the unchallenged center of historical research on Hispanics, especially ethnic Mexicans—a historiography that stretched from the first hagiography of Junípero Serra in 1787 to the works of the first Chicano historians in the 1960s. Moreover, since the mid-1980s, Los Angeles had come to challenge Chicago as the leading center of urban studies, with scholars drawing on more than one hundred years of English-language research and declaring the City of Angels the prime example of a polycentric or postmodern metropolis. In these same years, it became the leading site of research for a new generation of scholars who placed Latinos at the center of their analysis of how cities functioned. In the field of Mexican American and Latino history, the 1993 publication of George J. Sánchez’s Becoming Mexican American was a watershed event, demonstrating the intellectual promise of new community studies that fully interrogated both people and place within a broad theoretical framework. It served as a model for yet another generation of scholars, inspiring new histories of ethnic Mexicans in the region.
Notwithstanding the quality and influence of the emerging Latino histories in all these cities, the ongoing efflorescence of new Latin American immigrant communities far outpaced the historical profession’s capacity to chronicle them. Dramatic changes in national policy and international politics—especially the acceleration of U.S. interference in Latin American civil conflicts and economies, the debt crises in Mexico and other nations in Latin America, and the embrace of neoliberalism by Latin American governments—had set more migrants from a greater variety of countries into motion, and they had settled in a broader range of destinations. New places of origin gave rise to new communities, like the Salvadorans of metro Washington, DC. New destinations for older migrant flows led to growing Mexican communities in unaccustomed places like New York City and Atlanta. And the combination of both factors resulted in communities of Guatemalan Mayans in Morganton, North Carolina; Ecuadorians in Ossining, New York; and Mexicans in Indiana’s northern dunes, on town squares in Montana, and around the resort communities of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Whatever their origins and circumstances, by the 2010s, even the latest Latino communities that resulted from these changes were already two to three decades old—that is, old enough to merit histories of their own.
Metropolitan Latinidad was born of its contributors’ wish for a more representative history of the urban and suburban United States. Both in terms of American cities’ demography and transnational connections, we need a truly multicultural and multiracial urban history; a basic part of this must be studies of the fastest-growing group of metropolitan Americans. The growing presence and importance of people of Latin American ancestry in the United States is by now well recognized, with various quantitative measures having been the subject of many years of journalistic coverage: Latinas and Latinos already constitute one in five Americans, we deliver more than half of all population growth, and if we were a country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world. But even more notable for our purposes is the fact that Latinos are already predominant in much of urban America. To take just one compelling indicator, in six of the ten most populous cities in the United States in the most recent census, Latinos are already the largest population of any demographic group, with a higher proportion of residents than either non-Hispanic whites or Black people; and that figure is expected to reach seven of the ten within a few years. Similarly, in the twenty-five most populous U.S. cities, Latinos are a majority in two, more than one-third of the population in eight, and over one-quarter of the population in thirteen.
Given these figures, the time is long past when we can research, write, or teach urban history without giving a central place to Latinos. While it is true that history is a retrospective field as a matter of basic methodology, the urgency of rethinking our approach remains. Part of our responsibilities as urban historians is to describe the cities around us, so a central task before us is to explain how and why they look the way they do: to provide a historical analysis that helps us understand our present. Latino history must therefore be a fundamental concern of urban historians. But there are also important historiographical reasons we should want to see a new approach to urban history. The study of these indispensable Latino urban denizens also highlights important aspects of the development of cities that have not yet been fully accounted for in the historical literature: migrants as the human face of globalization, the many ways they shape metropolitan areas, new conceptions of race and identity, and the very different political alignments and economic conditions that result. What Vicki Ruiz, a giant in the field of Latina and Latino history, said almost two decades ago about the nation is even more true of its cities: “Nuestra América es historia americana. Our America is American history.”
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz is director of the Latina/o Studies Program and professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City and Hotel: An American History.
Excerpted from Metropolitan Latinidad edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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